johnminter

16 ms·

91.
by johnminter 11y ago
Udacity (and Coursera, edX, MIT OpenCourseware) can and do teach very helpful skills to large groups of self-directed learners. I have benefited from Coursera. I suspect that most who come here fit into that group. One problem is that a lar
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by johnminter 11y ago
Ah, the Smoke Alarm Supplication Dance. Great term. My wife and daughter had the same issue. They like to cook and can tomato sauce. Our smoke alarm would go off very easily - lots of false positives. One day my wife is vacuuming the hall a
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by johnminter 11y ago
I am certainly no fan of "chartjunk" and value clear graphics, I do not see the value of removing the lines on the axes. I find them to be valuable visual cues. I would also note that Tufte used them in his books, for example: ( h
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by johnminter 11y ago
I'll add to philtar's comment: Because senior management forces workers to use it. I'm a scientist who analyzes large data sets. I also need to communicate to my co-workers. I need a secure operating system without a lot of e
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by johnminter 11y ago
There is a lot more to housing cost than monthly payment (for P&I), taxes and insurance. Landlords also must pay for repairs, hedge against costs to evict those who do not pay and or trash the place, pay for water, sewer, garbage dispos
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by johnminter 11y ago
One example is Germany. I was talking with a German friend of mine at lunch and he noted that they are "tracked" after grade 8. Some go to trade school. Then (IIRC) there are two university tracks - one more prestigious (and more
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by johnminter 11y ago
I think one useful purpose was described by Prof. Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel of Duke at the recent UseR conference. She teaches an introductory statistics class for non-majors. Docker lets her spin up individual virtual machines for each student
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by johnminter 12y ago
Keith Baggerly and Kevin Coombes of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center tried to replicate the work and were instrumental in getting the investigation going. They have a very helpful synopsis here: http://bioinformatics.mdanderson.or
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by johnminter 12y ago
I tend to agree. I would frame the key traits as persistence and a view for the long term payoff. I did a stint as an Industrial Fellow in an NSF-funded center at U. of Minn. in the early '90s. My sponsor was chair of the Chem. E. dept
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by johnminter 13y ago
Do you want them to listen to you or be frantically writing? It is A LOT easier to annotate a PDF while pondering the concepts. Too many lectures are like a firehose...
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by johnminter 13y ago
My employer emerged from Ch. 11 bankruptcy a few months ago. Never underestimate legal fees and consultant fees. Japanese laws may be different, but I would be surprised if these fees did not consume a significant fraction of the assets.
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by johnminter 13y ago
Yup - often peddled by people with conflicts of interest - deriving their income from that education.
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by johnminter 13y ago
Informed analyses are the goal, and extensive study in an area is a benefit. That said, "experts" can and do have bias and conflicts of interest (funding, prestige, acquiring tenure...) so their analyses require scrutiny as well.
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by johnminter 13y ago
You need to take your employment contract to a lawyer and get legal advice before doing anything. Depending on the contract, you may or may not have rights to what you developed in your side project, especially if you are a salaried employe
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by johnminter 13y ago
I have wondered about Zareason laptops ( http://zareason.com/shop/Laptops/ ). Anybody tried them?
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by johnminter 13y ago
My employer (Eastman Kodak) had one of the few industrial research reactors built for neutron activation analysis (NAA) from 1974 to 2007. NAA provided great trace analysis of impurities that caused problems with photographic film and solid
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by johnminter 13y ago
A couple of items to consider. Does Linux support ALL the applications the programmers need to interact with other people in the company? The answer is "no" in my workplace. Our company has a lot of legacy VBA code that would need
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by johnminter 13y ago
I think it is about a boss showing respect for his/her employees, active listening to and consideration for their ideas, and valuing their work. Saying "thank you" goes a long way and costs nothing. Occasionally stopping in t
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by johnminter 13y ago
Excel's major problem is the ease in which point/click/copy/paste generates errors. There have been several recent cases where off-by-one cell errors have caused authors issues. This was one part of the Duke scandal (the
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by johnminter 13y ago
That's where version control helps. Save and commit frequently. It is much easier to go back to just before the problem and insert smaller chunks. Found many an error this way. Selective cutting of sections and stashing them in a text
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by johnminter 13y ago
Over the last couple of years I have migrated my workflow away from MS Office products (Word/Excel/VBA/PowerPoint) to LaTeX, R, Sweave/knitr. These tools play well with git and make it easy to automate an analysis. I am
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by johnminter 13y ago
I like the way Cosma Shalizi described it to aspiring statisticians: INDEPENDENCE: otherwise, you rely on someone else always having made exactly the right tool for you, and giving it to you. HONESTY: otherwise, you end up distorting the pr
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by johnminter 13y ago
Then there are those of us at the opposite end of the age spectrum... I hated the look of iOS 7. Very hard on aging eyes. Replaced the wallpaper with a custom photo with my favorite background color for my text editor. Still can't find
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by johnminter 13y ago
Try http://colorbrewer2.org/ - it has a setting for colorblind safe...
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by johnminter 13y ago
You forget that nasty reality called property and school taxes. In reality, one never owns one's home. You own it as long as you can pay any remaining mortgage and all the taxes. Let's also not forget maintenance costs. Ever paid
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by johnminter 13y ago
Sounds like Vienna would interest you... Not sure you could import your feeds directly, but it is not hard to set them up...
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by johnminter 13y ago
any site that you can't examine before signing up sends a red flag.
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by johnminter 13y ago
Show the importance of gmvault...
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by johnminter 13y ago
Yes. We have lab PCs here still running Windows NT because the upgrades for the hardware are either unavailable or would be prohibitively expensive (> $20K) and still not implement all the functionality. We tend to hide these from our w
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by johnminter 13y ago
Sounds like an honest assessment. You are neither a slave nor without choices. You are free to examine your job skills and transform yourself into someone who can get a more stable position in another field. As someone working through that

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